There’s a poignantly innocent tone to the rhetoric that flowed this week from the stout defenders of online privacy. Innocent in the sense of sincere, trusting, unworldly and absolutely simple-minded.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews wants to make it easy for Canadian police to learn, without going to the trouble of getting a warrant, the email addresses and phone numbers of people suspected of crimes. And if (as I suspect) many police forces already know exactly how to do this, Toews wants them to be able to swear in court that they obtained their evidence through unimpeachably lawful means.

The act before Parliament will require that phone companies and other Internet providers hand over this information as soon as police ask for it. In a rather pathetic gesture toward making the bill popular, the government cited in the title the most depraved criminals it could hope to catch. So it’s called the “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.”

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But it was the response to the bill that struck a curious note of naïvety. People criticizing Toews suggested that he was undermining the sacred principle of privacy. Charlie Angus of the NDP rose to the occasion with high-test hyperbole: “Now, every single Canadian citizen is walking around with an electronic prisoner’s bracelet.”

It’s a terrifying image, but entirely unrelated to reality.

Could it be that people like Angus don’t read the news? Do they not know that the term “online privacy” is now pure anachronism? Experience tells us that just about any level of secrecy on the Web can be cracked. Surely that was proven when the WikiLeaks hackers demonstrated that even the U.S. government can’t shield secret State Department memos sent by its ambassadors.

So far as I know, not a single authority on computers expressed surprise when the news about WikiLeaks broke. Everyone in the business knew that what WikiLeaks did could be done — and in fact many private firms and nations were doing it already. Today the tricks of rich corporations, rich governments and feckless amateurs are increasingly available on lower levels of hackery.

Possibly users of iPhones and similar devices believe that the names and addresses in their electronic directories are known to no one but themselves, just as if they were entered in the ancient paper address books that we all used during the Pleistocene.

But technology companies have slowly come to believe that they are also entitled to gather that data and, perhaps, use it. An investigation by the U.S. Congress revealed recently that in many cases personal data collected by application developers is stored and used without permission. Some may use it to expand their own network of customers, others may sell it to advertisers. Foursquare, Twitter, Yelp, Hipster and Instagram are among the app makers that have collected data from iPhones. Some don’t even bother to tell customers that they are storing it.

Or consider the online adventures of Nortel, which was considered Canada’s cleverest corporation until it applied for bankruptcy protection. Nortel had exceptionally bright researchers. But it turns out that Nortel was amazingly vulnerable.

Around the year 2000 hackers (they could have been Chinese) acquired seven passwords stolen from Nortel executives, including the chief executive. For eight or nine years the hackers ran through the digital synapses of the company, raping and looting, carrying off every R&D report and business plan that took their fancy. Pieces of Nortel having since been sold off, companies that bought them are afraid that they have accidentally acquired undetectable spyware imbedded in some of Nortel’s products. The word for that is “rootkit,” meaning stealthy malware designed to hide its existence, forever if possible. Did Ericsson get rootkit when it paid something over a billion dollars for part of Nortel? Will Ericsson ever know for sure?

Privacy is an ancient and once cherished right that has been transformed from a fact of life to a dying memory. And, as Facebook demonstrates several million times a day, a large part of humanity likes it the new way. Clearly, many users of social media think that the more everybody’s privacy is violated, the better. Call them extroverts, call them narcissists, and if you like call them flashers. Nevertheless, they have inherited the Earth, or at least a good part of the Internet.

The truth is that if hackers can’t get into your computer yet it’s because they haven’t found out how to do it but will soon. The alternative possibility is that they do not consider you worthy of their attention.